This article was originally published in the Customer Strategist Journal. Read the issue here.
The customer experience (CX) landscape is constantly evolving with changing technologies, customer behaviors, challenges, and opportunities. That’s always been the case — but as we head into 2025, things feel different.
Now that AI has fully made the leap from theoretical buzzword to a cornerstone of contact center operations and brands are seeing its benefits firsthand, the year ahead is poised to be truly transformative.
Brands are equipped with incredibly powerful analytics and insights they’ve never had before, which brings exciting opportunities to revolutionize how they think about and deliver CX on a much broader scale.
As we head in 2025, here are 5 major trends that will reshape the way CX is delivered in the contact center.
1. CX sheds its borders
The CX world will keep expanding (literally) as more locations across the globe become hubs for CX excellence.
AI-powered tools like real-time translation, accent localization, and voice enhancement will empower brands to break down traditional barriers and deliver amazing customer support from anywhere in the world. With these technologies, associates and customers can communicate easily with each other, no matter where they’re located.
With borderless CX, brands can escape the confines that previously limited the contact center. Seize the opportunity to look at new geographies, technologies, and strategies that can transform your CX operation.
Amid this changing landscape, companies will increasingly seek to do business in regions where they can make a lasting social impact. Areas like South Africa, Rwanda, and others are poised to emerge as top CX destinations thanks to their highly skilled and digitally savvy workforces, robust infrastructure, competitive cost benefits, and impact opportunities.
2. Data insights break through barriers
Data’s role in CX will grow more crucial, so it’s important to have systems in place that allow data to flow seamlessly between brands and customers across all channels. Contact centers traditionally tend to be very segmented, but in 2025 those silos will start breaking down.
Insights will become more powerful, and AI will get even better at predicting the best methods for resolving customer issues based on behavior and sentiment. Real-time data, innovative AI analytics, and experts who can put those insights to work will be foundational to CX success in the coming year.
The term “omnichannel” has been part of the CX lexicon for years, but in 2025 advanced channel orchestration will begin to dominate the contact center landscape in ways it hasn’t before.
Use AI-enhanced quality and insights tools to listen to all interactions, across any channel, and identify trends, challenges, and opportunities. Then, layer on quality experts who know how to cull actionable insights from your data to truly transform the contact center.
3. AI agents make their mark on self service
With first-generation chatbots firmly in the rearview mirror, AI-powered autonomous “agents” are set to transform customer experience. They’re smarter, more predictive, and easier than ever to integrate into CX systems.
AI will evolve from supporting human associates during interactions to collaborating with them in real time – offering suggestions, context, and sentiment analysis as interactions are happening.
Not only will AI agents help make associates much more efficient, but they’ll also let customers become more self-sufficient. Customers will increasingly resolve their own issues on their own time, without an associate, as AI-powered tools become increasingly accurate and tailored to individual customer preferences.
As this trend unfolds, resist the urge to adopt technology simply for technology’s sake. Rather, make sure your AI strategy is always guided by your customer journey, and seek to solve the most pressing customer pain points first to make the biggest impact.
4. A new CX workforce emerges
One of the many byproducts of AI that will rapidly evolve is the role of contact center associates. With routine tasks taken off their hands by automation, in 2025 associates will need to be equipped to handle more complicated and nuanced interactions.
Brands will look for associates who possess different types of skills. Soft skills like empathy will take on new importance, and associates will need to be more technically proficient to work in tandem with AI-powered tools.
A new workforce means a new approach to learning. In 2025, employees will expect training and coaching to be experiential, tailored to their specific needs, take place in the channel of their choice, and be available on-demand.
Lean into AI to help revolutionize your associate onboarding, training, and coaching. AI-enhanced training tools let associates role play realistic customer scenarios and deliver real-time feedback to help improve performance. And AI can listen to 100% of customer interactions to help inform training and identify immediate coaching opportunities.
5. Value grows in your customer base
When brands focus solely on resolving the customer issue at hand, they could miss out on opportunities to grow loyalty and revenue.
In 2025 and beyond, brands will become better at harnessing the full value of every interaction. Digging into data and insights will help them integrate sales efforts into more customer touchpoints, understand the optimal amount of effort to put into each interaction, and gain deeper knowledge around individual customer value. Companies will be better equipped to identify and prioritize their most valuable customers.
AI should play a leading role in this, too. Use AI-enhanced insights and analytics to listen to interactions, incorporate service-to-sales opportunities, and identify customers who have more potential value. Dig into data to get the best sense of where there are opportunities to maximize value, then ensure associates are trained and ready to meet the moment.
Embrace the new CX era
As 2025 approaches, brands have unprecedented tools, insights, and capabilities at their disposal to reshape their customer experiences. It’s an exciting time to make a mark on contact center operations and strategy.
At the same time, CX increasingly lives at the intersection of the contact center, customer relationship management (CRM), and AI and analytics. So be sure to connect the dots among those three key components with a holistic CX tech stack.
To deliver seamless experiences in 2025 and beyond, brands must strike the right balance between humans and automation — and have a strong, customer-centric strategy in place to guide them.